To the settle the matter of the Olympic boner that wasn't: First, American rower Henrik Rummel was celebrated for appearing to have a "giant boner" after he won the bronze. Then, on Reddit, he demurred, claiming that the sculpted outline visible through his rower's shorts was actually his flaccid, unerect member. This revelation prompted some august personages—including former Gawker editor Choire Sicha and current Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio—to pronounce Rummel's cock really big, if that's what it looks like during the off-season. This is hogwash. Here's proof that Rummel's cock is just a regular old cock.

Fact: the average straight person has sex about once every four years. (Except for 43-year-old…
Read more Read more

To begin: The average human flaccid penis, according to the Kinsey Institute, ranges from 1 to 4 inches in length. For Rummel's to be considered "huge," per Sicha, let's stipulate that its flaccid length would have to exceed the outer edge of the Kinsey average.

So how long is it? You will note that Rummel is wearing an Olympic medal in the photograph in question. The 2012 Olympic medals are, according to the official web site of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, 85 millimeters—or 3.3 inches—in diameter. While the camera is not placed directly in front of Rummel's medal in the photo, thereby distorting the apparent horizontal width, the vertical axis can be taken as a fairly accurate reference length.

When we transpose that reference length so that it is adjacent to the penis in question, it becomes clear that the length of Rummel's member is somewhere slightly south of the outward edge of Kinsey's normal range. While the positioning of the camera will obviously introduce some distortions, the penis and the medal are close enough and situated similarly enough as to permit us to draw a roughly accurate comparison.

The 3.3-inch-high medal traverses 55 pixels on its vertical axis. Assessing the length of Rummel's shaft using the most generous standards of measurement conceivable, I estimate that it extends 65 pixels north-to-south. That would put him—again, measured generously—at 3.9 inches.

So: Rummel's cock is squarely at a very healthy, high-end-of-normal length when not excited. He should be very proud of it. And maybe it's way outside the mean when erect. But in terms of flaccid penises, it's not "huge." Let's stop defining deviance downward, folks.